Travels with My Weather App

I added Santa Fe to the app because I went on vacation there. When my trip was over, I felt a pang of remorse at the thought of deleting the city.

Illustration by Goran Factory

It’s forty-four degrees and cloudy in Moscow; large brick residential buildings loom above a busy boulevard clogged with traffic. It’s sixty-four degrees and rainy in London; passenger boats on the Thames await tourists under a menacing sky. In New York, it’s eighty degrees and clear. The Chrysler Building fights for air, wedged between an uninspired tall black monolith and a truly ugly skyscraper with a pyramidal top. And in Los Angeles it’s seventy-nine degrees and sunny. Again. I can see straight across Universal City to the San Gabriel Mountains—or, if I look out my window instead of at the weather app on my screen, the trees that separate my house from the street.

Since moving to Los Angeles a year and a half ago, I’ve often found myself scrolling through the Yahoo Weather app on my iPhone—when I’m waiting for the bus, or for a tardy friend, or just sitting on my couch at home, procrastinating but sick of Twitter. From what I can tell, it’s no more—or less—accurate than any of the other free weather apps available in the App Store. But I like the Yahoo design the best; it’s more pretty than scientific, more conducive to daydreaming.

Even the icon on my iPhone screen is cutely unserious: a fluffy white cloud passing over a bright-yellow sun against a purple background. When I press the cloud to open the app, the first thing I see is a photograph culled from Flickr—Yahoo’s image-hosting site—that matches my current location and the approximate time of day. So: Los Angeles, often a shot of the Hollywood sign, in the morning, or the downtown skyline, at night. In the bottom-left corner, I find a brief status report—“sunny” or “clear” or “fair”—and the present temperature, plus the high and low. If I scroll down, I can access a host of details: a ten-day forecast, wind strength and barometric pressure, the progress of the sun and moon.

I never scroll down, though. I never linger on Los Angeles. Instead, I swipe right, which takes me to one of the other locations I’ve added to the app: New York; Santa Fe; London; Paris; Hong Kong; Jerusalem; Moscow; Evansville, Indiana. The combination of the crowdsourced image and the temperature gives me an instant impression of how it would feel to be in one of those distant cities. Google Maps can take me to virtually any street corner in the world. Yahoo Weather tells me whether I’d need sunscreen or an umbrella.

New York is on the list because that’s where I grew up, and where my parents still live. Yahoo’s cheesy shots of the Brooklyn Bridge and the financial district make me nostalgic for my birthplace; the weather conditions make me either relieved or sorry to have left. Forty degrees and sleeting back in New York when it’s seventy-nine degrees and sunny out here in Los Angeles? New Yorkers are suckers. Sixty-five and light rainfall there when it’s seventy-nine and sunny here? I miss that kind of variety; the Los Angeles caricature is fairly accurate—warm and dry almost every day.

I added Santa Fe to the app for practical reasons: I went on a brief vacation there and wanted to know how I should pack. When my trip was over, I felt a pang of remorse at the thought of deleting the city. I’d had such a good time roaming around its big back yard, marvelling at the red and yellow cliffs that inspired Georgia O’Keeffe. So I kept it, and now I can check in on the desert weather from time to time. The temperature drops fast as the sun sets; no wonder the locals always pack a sweater.

Evansville, Indiana, is where my husband’s family lives, and where I travel every year for Christmas. As I type, it’s seventy-seven degrees and cloudy there. Apparently—unsurprisingly—Flickr doesn’t have a deep reservoir of Evansville photos, so I’m usually served a lackluster image of the Ohio River, which flows through the city’s old downtown. Still, every time the Ohio pops up on my screen, I think fondly of the walks I’ve taken along its banks, headed for the pagoda-shaped visitor center.

My real-world visits to London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Jerusalem all preceded my relationship with the Yahoo Weather app. But I have friends in London, spent a personally significant eight weeks in Paris, aspire to live in Hong Kong, and have an emotional attachment to Jerusalem. It’s just as dry in the Israeli city as it is in L.A., while it’s often muggy in Hong Kong. And is it just me or is it always raining in Paris and London?

Not that I mind, because the Yahoo Weather app is at its best when there’s an atmospheric disturbance. An animated lightning bolt flashes in front of the Louvre pyramid; graphic raindrops obscure my view of Georgian architecture in what might be the West End. I realize I don’t actually know London well enough to identify the neighborhood, and pledge to change that, someday.

Moscow’s the one place stored in the app that I’ve never visited. A good friend from high school works as a lawyer there, but we communicate rarely—the time difference is too great—and we see each other even less. It comforts me that, even if I don’t know how she’s liking her job or whether she’s getting enough sleep, I know she’s wearing a scarf, or should be wearing a scarf. (Should I send her a scarf?)